Microsoft munches super startup carcass
Can you say Visual Studio for HPC?
Microsoft has eaten the carcass of Interactive Supercomputing, a creator of HPC development tools for parallelizing applications.
That's yet another promising supercomputing startup that has succumbed to the economic Meltdown and the difficulty of finding capital to fund its expansion. Redmond has acquired the company's the intellectual property and key employees.
Kyril Faenov, general manager of high performance and parallel computing technologies within Microsoft's Windows Server Division, made the announcement of the ISC acquisition on the division's blog. The financial details of the asset acquisition were not disclosed, but it is clear that Microsoft is not buying the whole company and it's not assuming whatever debts and obligations the privately held ISC had.
"This move represents our ongoing commitment to parallel computing and high performance computing (HPC) and will bring together complementary technologies that will help simplify the complexity and difficulty of expressing problems that can be parallelized," wrote Faenov in the blog.
"ISC's products and technology enable faster prototyping, iteration, and deployment of large-scale parallel solutions, which is well aligned with our vision of making high performance computing and parallel computing easier, both on the desktop and in the cluster."
Microsoft has been on a mission for the past two years to become a player in the HPC space, and it seems poised to grow its share of the HPC market by getting a hot at greenfield personal, departmental, and midrange supercomputers among researchers who do not have experience with Unix or Linux systems, who have for the most part work with Windows workstations, and who would prefer to stick with a Windows platform as they grow their applications.
Windows HPC Server 2008, Microsoft's second real pass at delivering a parallel clustering stack for Windows boxes, is an attempt to not only mimic the early success that the Linux platform had a decade ago with Beowulf clustering - and thereby putting Linux on the map as far as corporations and governments were concerned - but also to take away some of the HPC thunder of the Linux platform, which has usurped the dominant position in HPC that Unix once had.
ISC created a programming environment called Star-P, which allowed researchers to use familiar software packages such as MatLab or programming languages such as Python to develop their applications on a desktop machine and then have it automatically parallelized to run on a cluster of boxes.
Next page: Old Redmond pal
COMMENTS
@Mikel
"Other investors get nothing. That sum it up?"
Err, no.
MS will have bought the company *from* the investors (That's the VC's who set the company up by buying a chunk of it's stock and hence handing it the cash neede to rent offices, hire staff, buy neat hardware and get licenses to look inside proprietery software)
Now what MS paid the investors for it is another matter Could have been cash, stock in MS or a bit of both
Depending on the terms of the deal the investors may have made a nice pile, got away with a smaller loss than expected or be holding a block of MS stock.
The real loosers in this will be employees who did not transfer or who did but did not get stock options. Anyone who loaned the company money but did not get stock (hence not an owner) would also have likely lost.
Ignorance can be fixed. Stupidity is forever.
@Kiss of death
Obviously you have no concept of how acquisitions work. Good for you few spewing out a bunch of nothing.
Kiss of death
So ISC was going like gangbusters on Linux clusters and then they partnered with Microsoft and coincidentally got a new CEO. They went under and Microsoft winds up with their key personnel including the new CEO and the company's intellectual property - to make the product Microsoft HPC only of course. Other investors get nothing. That sum it up?
Another successful Microsoft joint venture!
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